season of the bitch

…but Natalia does. So go read her column on Russia and Georgia.

I have lots of comments on these issues, but they’ll have to wait until I get back home. For now:

1. I always knew John Edwards was too sanctimonious for his own good.

2. I do not for one second believe that they actually conveniently solved the anthrax case right as the guy offed himself.

3. Kwame Kilpatrick is not too bright.

4. Oh, now they’re getting around to impeaching him and now we think it’s an internal matter? (Wish I meant Bush. Not so much.)

5. I don’t even know what to say about Russia and Georgia. Wish I did.

That I’ll finish later today, I promise.

For now, I recommend this, Hilzoy on the government’s bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and this, wherein Latoya asks what we’re fighting for when it comes to feminism. Interestingly, both those writers are feminist bloggers who do not primarily center feminism in their blogging, yet I think it comes through in everything they say and do.

And for you to check out the new category in my blogroll: comics & art. Since they didn’t really fit in my regular blogroll and all.

I’ve got posts in draft and posts in my notebook and they’re all quite intellectual even if most of them are about comics. But a discussion at UnCool made me stop for a minute and toss this up right quick ahead of the good stuff I’m working on. Because technically I’m at work right now and thus don’t have the time to do justice to my other thoughts.

Twitter is my new crack. Love it. You can see it in my sidebar, and you can make me your twitter friend and see my lovely posts about politics, mimosas, and objectifying men in 140 characters or less. And I was thinking about its kind of necessarily-snappy, one-liner-ish quality. Because how much depth can you put into a couple of lines? (Maybe I’ll try short-stories-in-one-sentence via twitter next!) 

Twitter’s kind of another path to internet-stardom, or an addition to the one I’ve already got. Suits my newly BlackBerry’d lifestyle rather well, and is oddly addictive, especially when you’ve got friends that are quite witty with it. But it’s another step away from me and into persona-land. 

As was noted on the thread I linked above, everyone’s blog is a persona. Hell, even though mine has my real name on it, that probably forces me to create even more of a persona than not. If I had a pseud and was well-hidden on here, perhaps I could tell you the truth about how I feel about everything. (as it is, I save it for a few special people. very few.) 

My voice on here is a combination of several ‘voices’ that I cultivate as a writer. One of them is definitely snarky, another is those flashes of pure honesty that come over me at times, and a third is deeply analytical. They’re all pieces of me, and if you slag off any of them you’re still not slagging ME off. Because you don’t know me. 

Even though we make blog-friendships and such, there’s something about face-to-face interaction that I think can’t be replaced. Someone knows me far better if they’ve looked into my eyes while I’m ranting on about Scalia or Neil Gaiman or Lucero, and they find it harder to insult and rip on me. They still do it, I’m sure, but…yeah. 

Internet interaction is weird and fraught with miscommunications, misreadings of tone and inflection, and completely wrong assumptions about the identity and motivations of the others behind the keyboard. But it’s still just as hurtful as anything that happens out in the real, flesh world. 

Too many people I like have been getting slagged off for no real reason lately, and I’m sure my turn is coming. And so I tend to retreat even further into my own fledgling cult of personality (VERY fledgling) even though my compulsive honesty wants to tell everything–everything. 

But go tell Caroline you love her. 

Goalie fights!

Martin Biron (see below) vs. Ray Emery. Mmmmm…

US Casualties in Iraq: 4082.

Total US Wounded: 29,978.

Total suffering PTSD and other mental health problems: Unknowable, probably everyone who’s been there.

Iraqi Civilian Deaths: Unknown, documented estimates between 84,050 and 91,713.

It’s time to stop fighting within the Democratic Party or more broadly, the American Left and come together to elect a president opposed to this war, as well as senators, representatives, governors and the rest who are opposed to this war. This is bigger than whether or not the media likes one candidate better. Real people are dying.

And just to note: John McCain was one of three senators not there to vote for the Webb GI Bill. One of the other two was Ted Kennedy, and we know where he was. I don’t know where McCain was, but considering that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are still actively campaigning and McCain’s got his primary in the bag, his ass should’ve been there. Even if it was to vote against it, he’d at least be on the record. This is what’s at stake, people. Look at it.

We are all African.

All of humanity came from Africa.

And it is so easy to forget Africa, and especially African woman, because when Africa does make the news it is always a horror story, most often a story painted in terms of men struggling for power in the wake of colonialism. It is so easy to write it off as another horror story. To know what the word genocide means, but not really know what genocide is.

I do not have HBO, so I did not get to watch The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. However, many wonderful bloggers did and wrote about it.

These women have far more to say than I do, but I had to do my part, however small, to remind everyone.

We are all Africa. When women are raped and tortured in Africa, we all suffer. We are just not always conscious of it.

This made me sad.

I’ve just been really digging into the archives of her writing, too. I feel like I’ve lost the chance to really learn things, and plus I hate to see something that means so much to me become poisonous to people.

Feminism should not be used as a weapon against other women. It should not be an excuse. And it certainly shouldn’t have some bullshit hierarchy of importance in which certain women are more equal than others.

As I said in some other post, I will not yield to racism one inch of ground. I will not yield feminism to people who discount the work of women of color or of transwomen, of sex workers, of women in miniskirts. You don’t get to tell me what feminism means. It is as much mine as it is yours.

I don’t pretend to know what brings people to the moment when they have to say, enough. I know that I got more work done when I wasn’t plugged into the internet and checking my RSS feed every time it pinged at me.

At some point it goes from being informed and participating in discussion to being a drain on your time, your brain, and anything real you might want to accomplish.

That said, I hope you change your mind.

So one of my students told me today that Angela Davis was speaking at UPenn tonight. Naturally, I had to go see her.

How often in your life do you get to hear someone like that talk? Someone who’s truly been revolutionary, who has gone beyond regular activism to face prison and the death sentence because of her beliefs. Now, of course, she’s celebrated for them and is a university professor, but she’s still that revolutionary.

The line was huge.

They had to move us to a bigger room, and then there still wasn’t enough room and they had to nicely ask for volunteers to leave so that the fire marshals would allow the talk to go on.

When she asked how many people in the room were UPenn students, only about half raised their hands. That in itself is nice to see, that some of us came from other schools or jobs or places outside of the Ivy League. Wish I could afford UPenn. I can’t. But it’s good to be able to take advantage of some of the things it offers.

Angela Davis is a badass. There’s no better way to say it. And by virtue of being who she is, the things she says have meaning for people who may not be as progressive, as anti-capitalist, as feminist or as much of an activist as she is (or as I would like to be).

And because she is who she is, she can tell us that we should not look to individuals to guide us. That we should think about our communities, both local and global, and create “communities of struggle,” groups that work together beyond the Presidential election cycle to motivate real change. She urged us to think about the people who made history before the individuals given all the credit–”And it wasn’t Lyndon B. Johnson,” she noted–the women domestic workers in Montgomery who walked to work rather than ride the segregated buses any longer. The ones whose names we don’t know.

She’s in a unique position to speak about terrorism, because she was accused of being a terrorist herself. She can talk about prisons, having been in jails and having faced the specter of the death penalty and a life sentence.

She knows what it means to say that what changes in the law does not necessarily change the lived experience of people.

And she can say to us that we need to remember that every great change has happened because people have struggled for it. People, together, fought for change. They didn’t just go to the ballot box and vote in someone who would change things.

She closed by asking “What are you willing to do to make sure you make the world a better place for us all?”

What are we willing to do?

I need one of these NOW.

Declare yourself a “Rebellious Jezebel.” Proceeds go to NARAL Pro-Choice.